At long last, I finally have a new front fence. I could go digging through my blog posts or photographs to show you its somewhat ugly predecessor — which I built with limited resources in 2010, just to try to keep my rabbits hemmed in. 

Oh, OK, here. Isn’t it fugly?

In a post about making red pepper jelly, I wrote that I don’t have a post-pounder, an auger, or a sharp-shooter for digging the post holes. Page wire is the kind of fence I wanted, minus the barbed wire, however, when I found welded-wire fence at the hardware store, I bought it to finally commit to the project. I posted it would look something like this when done, except with nice round cedar fence posts from the country, and not square city posts.

The kind of fence I wanted was page wire, a wide-grid braided (wrapped, not welded, at the cross-points) wire fence that you find in farm country, with or without barbed wire to keep people out or critters in (some bovines will just knock it down if they really want to, but it isn’t safe for horses). However, when I easily found welded-wire fence at the hardware store, I bought it just to commit to the project. I posted it would look something like this when done, except with nice round cedar fence posts from the country, and not square city posts.

I rented a post digger shovel from Home Depot, and I got the help of one fine friend, Marc. He thought that round posts or square posts made a difference in ease of installation, until we got to work and saw it made no difference at all. We used six posts for the fence. Each one took about 45 minutes to dig – or at least it felt that way!

The sun was bright, and it was hot, and hair-metal music played on the boom box (which was called a Ghetto Blaster in Mr. T’s day). We joked about wearing beer t-shirts just to fit the work image. Marc had too much beer the night before, so we saved all cap-twisting for when the work was done.